Back in 2013, wanting to jettison every useless notion or thought as I set out to fulfil my calling to drive truth and ahimsa through every little thing I did, I embarked on a systematic enquiry into the concept of a personal deity, mine being Siva. 

My conclusion is that humans are limited by their own individual capacity to express their own understanding of their personal deity in everything they do, a continuous evolution until such point that the human internalises his or her capacity for full expression of all their deity stood for in their own eyes, from whence, its a mute point if the devotee has become the deity or the deity has become the devotee. 

I used Sivanadalahari, a book of 100 poems by Sri Sankara from the mid-first millennium, (there is controversy around which exact century he hails from, so I am dropping to the next claimable unit of time) as a point of reference or baseline to validate my own experiences. I published my conclusion and a few salient moments leading up to my conclusions in my booklet in the form of poetry in my mother tongue Tamil, earlier this year.[reference: Sumathy Ramesh,  Siva, ISBN: 978-06451052-0-9].  

The twin concerts compliment each othe by illustrating to me, my understanding using Sankara’s poetry using his own verses and my own poetry.

Kindly note, I assume no equivalence to Sankara’s bakthi nor vidwath; being a married Tamil bramin woman with children and related to/befriended by multitude of other men and women, my own limitation is my ever strengthening bond to humans- far from renunciation or respite at the feet of the lord. If that makes me an atheist, so be it. But in my mind, it doesn’t seem like a contradiction to being a staunch believer. Its like, the siddar and kurathi who hail from the kurinji nilam, are contented happy people, yet approach happiness from different perspectives, the siddar of renunciation, and the kurathi of impartial assimilation of all things that comes her way. My home town Palani, situated in the kurinji nilam, celebrates both the sidar and kurathi, the deity of Palani married to Valli, who is a kurathi.

You can order a copy of the 46 page booklet via https://www.lzerobzero.com/books its priced at AUD 10 plus postage. You can browse a few sample pages below.